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A Comparison of Fiber Based Material Laws for Myocardial Scar

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Abstract

The mechanics of most soft tissues in the human body are determined by the organization of their collagen fibers. Predicting how mechanics will change during growth and remodeling of those tissues requires constitutive laws that account for the density and dispersion of collagen fibers. Post-infarction scar in the heart, a mechanically and structurally complex material, does not yet have a validated fiber-based constitutive model. In this study, we tested four different constitutive laws employing exponential or polynomial strain-energy functions and accounting for either mean fiber orientation alone or the details of the fiber distribution about that mean. We quantified the goodness of fit of each law to mechanical testing data from 6-week-old myocardial scar in the rat using both sum of squared error (SSE) and the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) to account for differences in the number of material parameters within the constitutive laws. We then compared their ability to prospectively predict the mechanics of independent myocardial scar samples from other time points during healing. Our analysis suggests that a constitutive law with a polynomial form that incorporates detailed information about collagen fiber distribution using a structure tensor provides excellent fits with just two parameters and reasonable predictions of myocardial scar mechanics from measured structure alone in scars containing sufficiently high collagen content.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01 HL-116449 and R01 EB-137755.

Funding

This study was funded by NIH R01 HL-116449 and R01 EB-137755.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Laura R. Caggiano & Jeffrey W. Holmes

  2. School of Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Jeffrey W. Holmes

Authors
  1. Laura R. Caggiano
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  2. Jeffrey W. Holmes
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Contributions

Study design, data collection, and analysis were performed by Laura R. Caggiano and Jeffrey W. Holmes. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jeffrey W. Holmes.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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All experiments were approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

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Caggiano, L.R., Holmes, J.W. A Comparison of Fiber Based Material Laws for Myocardial Scar. J Elast 145, 321–337 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10659-021-09845-5

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